Chas Freeman on the collapse of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding and Israeli strategy in Lebanon
Glenn Diesen interviews Ambassador Chas Freeman, former US Assistant Secretary of Defense, on the resumption of US-Iran hostilities and Israeli moves in Lebanon.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Ambassador Chas Freeman about the rapid unraveling of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding, the resumption of military strikes between the US and Iran, and Israel's strategy in Lebanon and Syria. Freeman argues that the memorandum was never a genuine agreement — merely an agreement to seek agreement — and that the US has been renegotiating terms it already conceded on the battlefield and at the table. He contends that Iran has established effective control of the Strait of Hormuz and that this cannot be dislodged, with serious implications for global freedom of navigation. On Lebanon, Freeman argues that Israel has engineered a situation designed to instigate a civil war by delegitimizing the Lebanese government in the eyes of its own population. On Syria, he discusses the emerging Israel-Turkey rivalry and Iraq's pivot to overland oil transit through Syrian territory following the Strait of Hormuz closure. Freeman also examines Israel's long-term strategic position — its dependence on US-supplied weapons systems, the emergence of an Egypt-Turkey-Pakistan-Saudi Arabia security coalition, and his assessment that Israel is in the process of doing itself in through its own actions. He closes with a stark assessment that Washington has no functioning policy process, that the exclusive use of force is counterproductive, and that he sees no ray of hope for a satisfactory resolution of any of the current crises.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the collapse of the US-Iran memorandum of understanding
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. We have the great privilege of being joined today by Ambassador Chas Freeman, one of the great American diplomats who also served as the US Assistant Secretary of Defense. Thank you for coming back on the program.
Chas Freeman: Great to see you, Glenn.
Glenn Diesen: Likewise. We know that the US and Iran are now striking each other again. Trump is yet again threatening to eliminate Iran. We see that Israel and the government in Lebanon signed an agreement which, at least the Israeli media are celebrating as essentially setting the stage for a civil war within Lebanon. This happened all very quickly after the memorandum of understanding we were told was going to put an end to this war and bring peace to the Middle East. So what is it that has gone wrong, and where do you see this heading?
Chas Freeman: I think it should be called the memorandum of misunderstanding, because it's very clear that there is no understanding underneath it. Donald Trump either has forgotten what's in it — and he did sign it — or he didn't understand it to begin with, or he's simply doing what he usually does, which is renegotiating what he has apparently agreed to. So we see all sorts of new terms being added by the United States, and the United States basically continuing to contest the outcome of the war, which is the establishment of Iranian control of the Strait of Hormuz.
The memorandum of understanding says that ships will be permitted out of the Strait under arrangements managed by Iran, and Iran will not charge tolls for 60 days until August 21. That's in the agreement. Along with that, right up front, this agreement depends on the elimination of the war in Lebanon, the withdrawal of the Israelis, and a ceasefire. So every single element of this — the basic premises on which the Iranians were to open the Strait — has been violated by either Israel or the United States or both.
What we've seen in the Strait of Hormuz is an effort to pretend that the United States and the British Navy can control it by bringing tankers out without regard to the procedures that Iran has established, which the MOU appeared to acknowledge. Iran has naturally then enforced its control of the Strait by attacking these ships. That has led to retaliatory strikes by the United States — first on a basically symbolic level, and then more recently at a more severe level — and that in turn has led to Iranian strikes on US bases in Kuwait and Bahrain, which appear to have been quite serious in the amount of damage they've done, although as usual, censorship and the servile nature of the Western press have kept the facts obscure.
So we're basically seeing an illustration that this so-called memorandum of understanding — which is basically an agreement to seek agreement, not itself an agreement of any sort — is not in effect. A tit-for-tat retaliatory process is in progress. The survival of the MOU is in doubt. Israel has successfully defied the American agreement with Iran.
The Lebanese government — which has now acknowledged Israel's right to be in southern Lebanon, agreed that Israel will withdraw in accordance with Israel's own judgments on a gradual basis, and agreed that Israel and the Lebanese army will cooperate in smashing Hezbollah, which is the only effective resistance to Israel — this government is going to be remembered with all the affection that the French bestow on Marshal Pétain.
The broader regional picture: Syria, Gaza, and ethnic cleansing
Chas Freeman: What we're seeing is a return to chaos rather than order throughout all of West Asia. I haven't even talked about Syria, which Israel has also been bombing. Gaza of course continues to be subjected to genocidal squeeze, and the West Bank is in the grip of pogroms and expulsion orders — ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is also going on in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese government, which is hostile to the Shia population — a majority in Lebanon — is cooperating in ethnic cleansing in southern Lebanon.
We're seeing everywhere the culmination of 78 years of Israeli dedication to the greater Israel project and expansionism — to borders beyond whatever de facto borders exist. Israel has no agreed borders or frontiers. This is quite a mess.
I should add that the reason Donald Trump fantasizes about the MOU containing provisions which it doesn't, or tries to add them, and is served by Secretary of State Rubio — who basically went to the Gulf to affirm Donald Trump's fantasies about the Strait of Hormuz with a mostly cooperative GCC, not entirely, mainly with Bahrain, Kuwait, and the UAE, although I gather there were representatives of Saudi Arabia and Qatar present for the meetings — this is a classic effort to renegotiate what has been established on the battlefield and at the negotiating table, and it's not working.
Iran is not going to give up control of the Strait of Hormuz. The legal department of the Israeli foreign ministry famously declared that international law advances through violations — that violations of law establish new bases of legal norms. Iran has established such a norm, potentially, in the Strait of Hormuz. This is not a good thing, because it means that other straits — whether the Bab-el-Mandeb, Lombok, Sunda, the Strait of Malacca, the Strait of Taiwan, and so forth — all potentially face control by the littoral states, who will then charge administrative fees for transit. The freedom of navigation, which is enshrined by the way in early Islamic law as well as by Hugo Grotius, the great Dutch legal scholar who wrote Mare Liberum — the freedom of the seas — around 1609 or so, all of this is collapsing. Quite a mess.
The question of whether the war can end
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, that's a good way of defining it. But I think most people realize that the MOU wouldn't necessarily be followed. Trump expressed his need to get the oil out, and he agreed to terms which seemed very unlikely he was going to fulfill. Indeed, he was contesting these points even as it was put down on paper, so ignoring the rest was predictable. How do you understand the resumption of attacks on each other? Is this the United States trying to renegotiate — that is, to punish Iran if it tries to follow the parts of the MOU which it wants, and hope that they won't retaliate? Or do you think they're not going to be able to put an end to the war? Is there a path to a ceasefire, or is it just very hard to see one?
Chas Freeman: We have an assumption that all wars must end, but sometimes they don't. If you look at West Asia, Israel has been at war with everybody on an intermittent basis — but still, it's all one great war, really — since before its establishment. The earliest Zionist settlers had a plan for ethnic cleansing which they carried out in 1947–48, and which they've repeated on other occasions, including after the 1967 war when some 300,000 Palestinians were driven out of their homes. This area has basically been at war, I would say, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the European carve-up of it in the Sykes-Picot agreement. There has been basically conflict, and the only question is what is the intensity of the conflict.
So we may be going back to that situation — that is, more of the same. There will be no agreement to end the war. This is a contest of stamina, a war of attrition. How long can the United States continue the blockade? The wear and tear on ships and personnel is very considerable. The wear and tear on the American global reputation is very considerable.
Basically, what unites everyone who is at war with the United States — whether it's Hamas, Hezbollah, the Russians, the Iranians, the Venezuelans, the Cubans — what unites them all is the conclusion that the United States is agreement-incapable. It is not able to do a deal. Well, "deal" is the wrong word, because a deal is inherently transactional, and as you know, in diplomacy, in foreign relations, every negotiation is not just negotiating a transaction but negotiating a relationship. The United States apparently doesn't understand that, and therefore imagines that it can approach foreign relations in the same way that real estate developers approach property owners or buildings in New York. If you want to redevelop a property, you evict the tenants — that's ethnic cleansing, in effect.
You want to do a deal, you read The Art of the Deal written by Donald Trump — not the one that Andy Borowitz has attributed to Machiavelli. I don't know if you saw that, but Andy Borowitz, who is a comic genius in the United States, said tongue-in-cheek that Machiavelli had won a major literary prize for a new work called The Art of the Deal, the main premise of which was that in order to win in a negotiation, you must always negotiate with a gun. Maybe that is exactly what is happening. Maybe it's no more profound than that.
There is no constancy. The American word doesn't count for anything. The signature of Donald Trump — ornate as it is, with a Sharpie pen, heavy-duty ink — might as well be invisible ink. For me as an American, I find this deeply disturbing. We have succeeded, with the Israelis, in trashing international law, in destroying the basic trust in our diplomacy that is essential to advance our interests. We have destabilized situations everywhere.
The pivot back to Ukraine and European escalation
Chas Freeman: In the middle of this, Donald Trump, having been frustrated in his pursuit of a notable victory in West Asia, seems to be pivoting back to Ukraine. I think that issue is becoming very, very dangerous, with European countries — now deprived of American supplies of weaponry — developing their own means of assisting Ukraine to conduct long-range strikes into Russia, on the assumption, which I think is going to be proven wrong, that they have immunity from retaliation.
I think particularly the British, who've been boasting about their development of new weaponry for Ukraine that does not have American components and therefore is independent of Donald Trump and the United States, but will enable Ukraine to strike even deeper into Russia — I think they're going to have a mafia moment. You know: nice factory you have here, too bad if something happened to it. I suspect sabotage is the first step. I don't think we'll see a Russian missile strike on that factory, but who knows?
At this point, NATO is in sufficient disarray that Article 5 is not a very credible deterrent. I'm very concerned about the dynamic that has been set up. Meanwhile, the Europeans continue to debate — actually, they are beginning to discuss, which is positive — the idea of actually talking to Russia. According to some Europeans, talking to Russia is a sellout. You shouldn't do that. Why should you talk to the devil? Well, the answer is that if you don't talk to the devil, the devil may do devilish things to you, and you have no influence whatsoever over what the devil does. We're seeing an escalation and counter-escalation cycle reach a higher level in the case of Ukraine, and that is very dangerous.
Glenn Diesen: I also thought it's becoming impossible for Russia now not to respond. I always thought the retaliation would either come against the Baltic states or Germany, but the UK obviously is on top of that list as well. If you look at last year, the attacks on Russia's nuclear deterrent — the FSB confirmed that MI6 had been involved. So of course it wouldn't be impossible for Russia to do something similar with plausible deniability — drones within the UK striking critical infrastructure, military targets, but most likely production facilities. The mafia method you described.
But overall, the comparison between Russia and Iran is that they're both being set up by the West for what seems to be a forever war — low intensity, also low in Russia, but they want to lower it to the extent where time is on NATO's side, gradually degrading not just Russia but also the Iranian economy. In any war of attrition, you measure how much pain each side is taking. How much is Iran willing to cede this kind of control to the United States? The hawks in Tehran, the reason they opposed this memorandum of understanding was because they quite sensibly predicted it wouldn't be implemented on the US side. Indeed, you don't really need a crystal ball, because Trump was already contesting the idea that any money would be transferred to Iran even as the memorandum was being signed. So why would they trust this?
Forever wars and the absence of strategy
Chas Freeman: There is no trust in any of these dynamics. Let me make a few comments. First, I don't think forever wars are a strategy. I think they are an inadvertent result of the lack of strategy. There are no clear objectives. Those objectives that are stated are not feasible — they are fantasy objectives. The objectives are contained in a kaleidoscope which shifts with every moment that it turns. There's no priority set among them. Therefore the goalposts are moved during the war. You can always find an excuse for continuing the war. There's no war termination strategy because there are no clear objectives and no benchmarks for measuring progress, and so you've got a forever war, and it goes on and on and doesn't end.
The classic recent example is of course Afghanistan, where no one could ever explain why we were there after the initial punitive raid on the Taliban as the hosts of al-Qaeda. We've all forgotten that we went to war for women's education, or something — a noble cause no doubt, whatever it was, but it went on for two decades and produced nothing except the return of the Taliban to control in Afghanistan. So this is a forever war. I think it requires a definition, and I think I've just provided one. It is indeed what seems to be happening with both Ukraine and Iran.
Which brings me to my second point. The United States armed forces, and those of Israel, and perhaps NATO as well — meaning the combination of European forces with American forces — these armed forces are all structured for short, victorious wars, not for wars of attrition. We've seen the consequences of the debilitation of the military-industrial base everywhere, except Russia and Iran, which seem to have figured out how to sustain production of relevant weaponry.
The war has produced some interesting new twists. As the global order falls into disarray, we see things like Ukraine, which has developed — with Chinese components — an extremely effective drone production industry. They get their components from the Chinese, just like the Russians. The Russians also get Iranian components, and maybe North Korean ones as well. The Ukrainians have become masters of drone warfare, which turns out to be the sort of warfare that the day requires. They are now developing military relationships and support relationships with countries like Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf countries, which means they're becoming part of a substitution for these countries' previous reliance on American technology — technology which turns out to be unable to cope with hypersonic missiles and drones and the combination of the two, as demonstrated by Iran.
Marco Rubio's visit to the Gulf notwithstanding — an effort to redefine the MOU to conform to Donald Trump's fantasies about it — this does not halt the ongoing discussion between the Gulf Arabs and Iran about the post-American-blockade future of the Strait of Hormuz, which is going to remain under Iranian control. There's no way to dislodge it. One other thing about forever wars is that they turn out to be pointless, and that's pretty much the case here.
Israel, Turkey, and the new fault lines in Syria
Glenn Diesen: All of these wars are very much entangled with each other, so it's very hard to discuss one without touching on the others. I did want to switch a bit to the Israeli component, because as you said, they're also very heavily involved in Syria. Before, Iran was a key backer of Syria, which shaped Israel's foreign policy. Now that Iran is out of Syria to a large extent, the new enemy of Israel appears to be Turkey, and the rhetoric there is becoming increasingly aggressive. Naftali Bennett spearheaded some of the most hawkish rhetoric. How do you see this developing? Because that's a different dynamic. At least with Iran, the US and Israel both consider Iran to be one of their main enemies, but now with the Israelis switching their main enemy to Turkey, you have a NATO state. It complicates things quite a bit.
Chas Freeman: Quite a bit. Syria is a country in multiple transitions. Under al-Sharaa — the former al-Jolani — who is now the self-declared leader of Syria, he is accommodating the Turkish demand that Syrian Kurds be integrated into a national army on terms that avoid a challenge to Turkey from those Kurds. Meanwhile, in Turkey itself, Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the PKK, has made his peace with the authorities, and the Kurds are relatively quiet. The Kurds in northern Iraq are very much under Israeli influence and played a role apparently in the attack on Iran — or at least the region did.
Syria's great asset is its geographical location. It is between the Mediterranean and the interior of West Asia and Central Asia, not too far from the Black Sea. It's a transit point. Historically, the Chinese Silk Road debouched at Aleppo and on the Syrian coast, and this is returning. A very interesting thing is that you have an Iraqi government — which is very closely aligned in many ways with Iran, Shia-dominated — which is making its peace with the Syrians. Why? Because the closure of the Strait of Hormuz deprived Iraq of 90% of its revenue, which depended 90% on oil exports, and those oil exports stopped. So now how does Iraq export its oil? It does so overland through Syria, and eventually there will be a pipeline of some sort — as there was in the past — that enables a much higher volume of Iraqi oil to exit that way. Iraq is also exporting through Turkey.
Meanwhile, as you indicated, there is an ongoing strategic geopolitical rivalry between the Israelis and the Turks playing out in Syria, not so much in Lebanon. This is all in ferment and nobody can tell you at the moment where it's going to end up. But it's clear that Israel intends to keep the Syrian territory that it has occupied, just as it intends to keep the Lebanese territory that it has occupied.
Israel's strategy in Lebanon and the engineering of civil war
Chas Freeman: You mentioned quite correctly that the Israeli calculation in Lebanon is that what they've just signed with the Lebanese government will produce a civil war, because it basically makes the Lebanese government illegitimate in the eyes of a very large part of the Lebanese population. They have sold out Lebanese sovereignty to Israel. They have proposed to cooperate in the ethnic cleansing of Lebanese Shia, and they have agreed to join Israel and the United States in open enmity toward Hezbollah — which is, of course, part of that government, represented in the Lebanese parliament.
This is indeed a very clever Israeli formula for starting a civil war, which will of course aid Israel's consolidation of its position in Lebanon and bring even more misery to the Lebanese. It may also very well cause a resumption of refugee inflows to Europe, which have destabilized Europe in the case of Syria. Now we may see Lebanon producing much the same result.
This is all a very bad set of developments, and on top of it we have a — not quite a rupture, but an open break in some respects between the United States and Israel. This is the first time that has happened since the George H.W. Bush administration pulled the plug on subsidies for Israel over the issue of its settlement activity in the West Bank. But this is much more serious. It's not clear exactly what the United States has withheld from Israel, but at least in principle, the Trump administration has declared that Israel no longer has a blank check in Lebanon, is no longer free to do whatever it wants, and that the United States intends to control this. Israel, for its part, has retorted that the United States will not control this — Israel will do what it pleases.
I think we have here an Israeli assumption that the basis of Zionist support in the United States will be sufficient to prevent Donald Trump from actually carrying out his threats to rein in Israel. We'll see what happens there.
One other point, very relevant: not only is the traffic through the Strait of Hormuz disrupted, but there was supposed to be a negotiating meeting in Switzerland today between the Americans and the Iranians. I don't think that happened. I think Iran may be back to saying that American violations of the MOU mean that there can be no discussions based on the MOU.
If that's the case, then we're seeing the compounding of a problem that's going to exist anyway, even if there are negotiations and the MOU's sanctity is somehow restored. That problem is that the United States is running out of stored oil, and the world is running out of stored oil. There is a gap between the emergence of supplies from the Strait of Hormuz under the most optimistic assumptions and the supply of oil at refineries throughout the world, with the result that all of the dire predictions about major price increases for oil, the collapse of crop production due to fertilizer shortages, and other consequences of the cutoff of Strait of Hormuz traffic are all about to hit us pretty quickly.
This is before the midterms in the United States, which Donald Trump is fixated on. He's making a big effort to use his oversight of the US Postal Service to deprive American voters of the right to use mail-in ballots, having created a myth that there's some sort of major fraud associated with mail-in ballots — for which there's no evidence, but that is a matter of faith for many followers of Donald Trump in the MAGA movement. So he's under huge pressure from his donors, from his base, from international society, from the Russians and Ukrainians in their interaction, from Iran, from the Gulf Arabs, and from Israel. One cannot envy his position at all. On the other hand, he put himself in that position. No one else did.
The US-Israel split and the future of Israel
Glenn Diesen: You would think that with all the domestic problems and the Middle East on fire, the resumption of war with Iran, perhaps this would not be the best time for the US to deepen its involvement in the proxy war against Russia. But apparently that's a decision also being taken.
About Israel — I agree with your assessment. I think what they did in Lebanon was quite clever. That's not a normative statement, but only in terms of essentially outsourcing the destruction of Lebanon. Why put this at the shoulders of the Israeli army? Why not instigate a civil war? Indeed, part of this deal between the Lebanese government and Israel essentially meant that the Lebanese government and its soldiers began to pull away from the south, and as protests began to erupt in Lebanon, those soldiers, instead of protecting their own country from Israel, are now being used to silence their own citizens. You can see this is one possible — if not very likely — scenario. But while this is a victory for Israel, you also have other problems: the US-Israel split, which is quite significant; Israelis are still exhausted by the wars; they have their own economic problems; there's some political instability. It looks like Netanyahu might be forced out, but again, he's not really the most hawkish person in Israeli politics. He would likely be replaced with someone like Naftali Bennett, which means we might end up missing Netanyahu. So where do you see Israel heading? What is its strategic thinking? How does it get out of this victoriously?
Chas Freeman: Israel is now engaged in a multi-front war of attrition. Benjamin Netanyahu — who is not stupid; he may be evil, but he is not stupid — has declared that Israel is fighting on seven or eight fronts, and he's quite correct. How does a state survive under these circumstances when it has alienated its foreign support, still has the United States as an unreliable patron but a patron nonetheless, has lost its support largely in Europe, and is alienated from everyone in the region?
Various Israeli achievements — for example, the Camp David Accords, which were actually an American diplomatic achievement forced on Israel — have produced a cold peace with Egypt. Egypt is now actively engaged in a cooperative military relationship with Turkey, the very same Turkey that Naftali Bennett says is the enemy. Egypt and Turkey are involved with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in a four-party coalition which aspires to be the core of a new security architecture in West Asia and also to produce a military-industrial base that would wean the region from its dependence on imported weaponry.
Israel's weapons — two-thirds or more — come from the United States. The vaunted Israeli missile interception systems — Iron Dome, David's Sling, Arrow — are all co-developed by the United States and paid for by the American taxpayer. I know because I used to authorize the Iron Dome payments when I was at the Defense Department. Israel cannot easily wean itself from its dependence. It doesn't have the weight of the four-party coalition I referred to in terms of developing an independent military-industrial base. I don't think the Russians, who are an alternative source of supply, or the Chinese, are going to step in and replace the United States for Israel.
Europe itself is much less than the sum of its parts. Even the Germans are beginning to wobble in their support for Israel. There is widespread emigration from Israel — we don't know how much. You're in Crete at the moment, I gather, and may hear a lot of Hebrew being spoken if you put your ear to the window.
What is the future of this apartheid state, which has now picked fights with absolutely everyone — not just in its region but in the world — and which is an international pariah, not welcome in polite company anywhere? Are there trends toward greater support for Israel, either within Israel or abroad? I don't think so.
On the other hand, I want to make a point going back to your very correct observation that replacing Netanyahu doesn't necessarily accomplish anything — quite the opposite. 75% of Israelis support the genocide and the aggression. This makes them very different. Even in Nazi Germany, most Germans were willfully unaware, or maybe genuinely unaware, of what their government was doing in terms of the Holocaust and the slaughter of Slavs in the East. The Israelis are witting accomplices in this, supporters of it. That so thoroughly discredits the Israeli state that you have to assume eventually there will be a day of reckoning for Israel on this.
I note in that regard that the Hashemite — identified now as a Sayyid, meaning a genetic descendant of the Prophet Muhammad — is now calling for lawfare on Israel in the United States for violations of international human rights law and humanitarian law. We may actually see a funny thing happen: the world unite around the World Court and the International Criminal Court against those who have sanctioned these bodies, threatened their judges and their families, and otherwise engaged in really despicable acts of contempt of court.
Where does Israel go from here? If you were asked to write a life insurance policy on the place, you wouldn't do it, because all the indications are that it's in the process of doing itself in — suicide, not being done in by others. It's being done in by its own malicious, sadistic actions.
Escalation control, nuclear weapons, and the absence of policy in Washington
Glenn Diesen: I'm worried about the escalation of the chaos here, because I keep making the point that it's the illusion of escalation control — that we can somehow manage this chaos, this conflict with the Russians, with the Iranians — that we can keep the peace, escalate at will, and deescalate if necessary. I think this is what's going to invite disaster, because it's going to be proven wrong. I saw in the New York Post — they cited Iranian media linked to the IRGC; I didn't check the original source — but it mentioned that those Iranian media outlets were arguing that Iran would need a nuclear weapon now, that the Americans aren't going to accept any peace, that all of this diplomacy is pointless.
Chas Freeman: That is an obvious consequence of this war, and we've discussed it before. The United States and Israel murdered the leaders who were most opposed to weapons of mass destruction, leaving in place leaders who are in favor of them because they see their necessity — just as North Korea did in response to maximum pressure on it.
But I want to make a more fundamental point, agreeing with you that the prospects for pulling the chestnuts out of the fire in this case are not good. There is no policy process in Washington. Washington has been the global hegemon which held everything together, which stabilized the world — and many would argue that the United States did that in highly objectionable ways, but it bestrode the world like a colossus. That colossus has now suffered a frontal lobotomy. There's no brain there. There's no policy process that renders considered judgments about how to deal with all these issues. There's no setting of priorities. Everything is determined by the gut of the president — a rather large gut these days, actually. It's all very unpredictable, chaotic, and destabilizing.
The prospect that wise or clever policy — even clever in the sense that the Israelis are clever in Lebanon, devious policy — will rectify the mess is not good at all. That should be of grave concern to all of us, and I suspect it will have a major impact in the midterm elections in the United States. But the idea that elections can curb Donald Trump's whimsies has yet to be proven, and we shall see.
The predictability of the current trajectory and the question of optimism
Glenn Diesen: It seems that all the conflicts we're heading into now are so predictable. We all learned in school how we sleepwalked into World War I, but this — the path seems charted quite clearly. Those Iranian media outlets, the hawks in Iran, were just saying there is no diplomacy to be made with the West. They haven't won the argument yet, haven't been able to transition from argument to policy, but you can see they have the wind in their sails — they're the ones being proven right. I get the same impression from Russia, where you see some Kremlin hawks arguing: why are we even talking to the Americans? This is pointless. Why are we trying to talk to the Europeans? They're essentially saying: let's eliminate Zelensky, let's carpet bomb the government district of Kyiv, let's use a tactical nuclear weapon or two against some of the Europeans. Again, they haven't won Putin over in terms of turning this into action, but I'm not sure anymore about Putin's restraint. Is this absurd, or are they building up an archival stockpile in preparation for a conflict which seems unavoidable? As a last question — is there anything that gives you a source of optimism that there might be some course correction? Because I don't see any of these main issues being discussed in the media at all. It's just: how good we are, how bad everyone else is, and we just have to defeat everyone. That's essentially the only solution being offered.
Chas Freeman: A rational examination of the record would demonstrate that the exclusive use of force — military means to achieve objectives — is counterproductive. With specific reference to the nuclear issue: Iran agreed that for 60 days it would not detonate a device. That's the way I read that part of the MOU. It didn't say anything about what happens after 60 days. The notion that somehow Iranians are going to conclude that the United States will keep its distance from Iran and not threaten Iran is daily violated by our president and his assistants.
Which brings me to a final point. Very ironically, every time Ukraine strikes deeply into Russia, it validates the Russian argument that a hostile presence in Ukraine is a major threat to the Russian state. The Russian Federation cannot safely tolerate a foreign force under NATO or under any other rubric in Ukraine. This is in fact an intolerable threat, and it is of course what started this war — that Russian perception, which was fed by NATO expansion. I remind people that historically Russia has reason to worry about attacks from its neighbors. Both the French and the Germans have invaded Russia, in each case with terrible results for Russians, and in the end terrible results at least for the Germans. The Mongols did that earlier. Russia seems to have made its peace with the Mongols and with the Chinese, who were part of the Mongol Empire at the time.
To claim that history demonstrates a Russian desire to invade Western Europe, as opposed to pursuing retreating armies into Europe, is really quite remarkable, and that seems to be the functioning myth in European foreign policy. They don't have any diplomacy.
No, I don't see any ray of hope for a satisfactory resolution of the various instances of chaos that we have unleashed. I do not.
Glenn Diesen: That's an important distinction you've pointed out — that most of the Russian military incursions into Western Europe have been following retreating armies, as opposed to having instigated these conflicts. That's quite important, especially today. When I was teaching security strategy, I always made the point that the starting point is a security competition arising from international anarchy — this is why more weapons isn't always more security. But if you see what we have achieved now: we took on Iran, we didn't want it to get nuclear weapons, it didn't want to have nuclear weapons, and now it does. We talk about Russia wanting to attack NATO — it's absurd. It never had that goal. Indeed, it has gone through great lengths over the past four and a half years to avoid widening the war to NATO. Well, now they might, because of NATO's direct involvement in attacks on Russia. It's just the absence of strategic thinking. Any call for restraint is seen as a Russian conspiracy, and somehow going after adversaries as hard as possible is the patriotic thing to do. It doesn't matter that it failed spectacularly in Iran, or that it's going to fail and bring disaster in Russia. That's the only path, it seems.
Chas Freeman: Part of every forever war is an effort to reinforce failure — that is, to double down on the failure, do more of the same, pour more money at it, as though somehow doing more of the same is going to produce a different result. Forever wars have a built-in escalation clause, and we're seeing that.
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, definitely. That's been the experience in the post-Cold War era. Anyways, Ambassador, as always, thank you so much for sharing your insights.
Chas Freeman: Enjoy Crete.